Project Overview

In response to a recent community survey, the City of Sydney’s Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) project has delivered a state-of-the-art, safe & secure registration and authentication platform that provides access to all of the City’s digital services. The City of Sydney’s vision is to transform the digital experience for current and future users of the City’s digital systems and deliver a world-class, people-centred digital experience. The CIAM project delivered benefits to the community by empowering them to manage their access and interests while at the same time offering benefits to Council through improved, targeted and more cost-effective customer service.

Organisation

City of Sydney

Team

Subhadeep Sengupta (Senior Project Manager) Ian Deng (Technical Lead) Christian Reyes (Business Analyst) Dean Purcell (Business Analyst) Jay lee ( UX creatives) Janine Poon (UX creatives) Test Lead (1 person) CIAM vendor (3 persons) Library vendor (2 persons) What's On vendor (1 person)

Project Brief

The City of Sydney has embarked on an ambitious program of digital transformation that is delivering, with a single sign on, access to all the of the City’s digital services. The platform empowers the community to create and link their digital identities and gain simple & safe access to the City’s libraries, What’s On service and upcoming digital services such as City Connect and the digitisation of all paper forms. The foundation piece that has been designed and built to power the City’s digital transformation is the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform. Prior to the delivery of CIAM community members had to have a log in to each individual service to which they subscribed. Those wishing to access both the City’s libraries and list events on the What’s On page needed to have two different accounts and therefore, two different log-ins. Community members made it clear, in a recent survey, that they wanted council to provide seamless access to the City’s digital services and ensure that their data was safe & secure. CIAM has delivered: • a single login/sign-on to access all services • information seamlessly integrated • secure transactions • secure storage of personal data The CIAM platform provides a safe and secure basis from which the council can deliver on its Digital Transformation Programme and provide modern, safe and quality customer service. To date, feedback from the community has been very positive.

Project Innovation/Need

The CIAM project transformed the way the City’s community engages with its digital services. It consolidated more than 300,000 accounts and addressed duplicated customer identities to provide a single unique customer identity that can be used across the libraries and What’s On listing plus those that will be launched in coming months. The CIAM system offers residents & community that have multiple logins to different digital services a single, unique and frictionless registration process that gives automatic access to the Library and What’s on listing services. Rather than council staff or residents & community members manually linking their accounts, CIAM offers automated linking to those services. The single sign on feature provides secure and seamless access and is the digital passport for gateway to the future suite of digital services. Similar to MyGov services, where a citizen’s government interactions can be linked and accessed via a single sign-on so to the City of Sydney’s services are linked by a single log-on. The difference between MyGov and the City of Sydney Services is that CIAM provided an automated link that made the process of linking services transparent and simple for the residents and the community. Prior to CIAM, the City did not have visibility of a user’s journey through the digital services and so was not able to analyse or improve the user experience. Now the City has a rich source of data that can be used to curate the user experience and provide customised services.

Design Challenge

Having undertaken a customer feedback survey in 2019 it was apparent that the City needed to modernise its interaction with the community and residents. The CIAM project was kicked off to address the multiple user accounts and to consolidate them into a single sign on to better enable access to current and future digital services. Given that Council had a pool of 300,000 disparate digital identities, the challenge faced by the project was to determine which of those 300k were unique, which were shared and which of those that were duplicates and could be merged. Additionally, the City of Sydney’s CIAM project was confronted with several challenges in the design of the solution compounded by disparate data, processes and different digital identities across the City’s services. After consulting with the appropriate business units, it was clear that there was a significant number of duplicated and shared accounts. The project team successfully devised a strategy that treated the shared library accounts in a way that did not impact the users’ experience accessing the services. The project team conducted several user experience sessions, inviting the library and What’s on users of the to contribute to the experience of creating and managing their City of Sydney CIAM account.

Future Impact

The City of Sydney was able to influence the vendor to offer onshore data storage. This request had been put to the vendor by other organisations over a 10-year period, but it was the ultimate influence of the City that convinced the vendor to comply with the NSW PPIP Privacy & NSW SRA Acts. The result being that the data centre is situated in Australia and not offshore and so improving the data security for the City and other organisations that might adopt this product and solution. Working with the vendor, the City delivered an embedded sign-in function that allows the user to remain on the same webpage when they sign into a digital service or create a new account. That feature provides an added level of security to the users and the City. It guards against phishing & Man-In-The-Middle Attacks (MITM) and website spoofing. The solution also delivered a custom domain name which helps to further counter spoofing attacks. Refer to images 5 to 8 for more details. For 5 years, these features had been requested by several organisations in Australia and it was the influence and lobbying of the City of Sydney that saw it come to fruition. This work can serve as a template for the Australian digital ecosystem for digital identity transformation, leveraging global best practice to deliver seamless access to multiple digital services using a single account.